Warners chief Kevin Tsujihara announced the project in October 2014 as part of a slate of 10 DC films stretching into 2020. Though the studio believed there was enough time to get the movie done, a source with ties to the project says it was a sprint from the start. “[Ayer] wrote the script in like, six weeks, and they just went,” he says, arguing that the whole process would have benefited if Ayer, 48, had been given more time to work. But another source closely involved with the film says once it was dated, pushing back the release was not an option: “It’s not just that you’ve told the public the movie is coming, you’ve made huge deals around the world with huge branding partners, with merchandise partners. It’s a really big deal to move a tentpole date.”

So you take a guy with no experiencing director high stakes tenpole summer movies, and throw in a script that was written in six weeks, and you expect no issues to come from that?